A Soldier’s Heart: Let There Be Light

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is the invisible wound that scars war veterans, and some individuals are so afflicted that they die physically or psychologically from this traumatic wound through suicide, homicide or incurable psychosis. In 2012, this disorder is recognized and understood in ways it never was before, making it more possible for traumatized men and women to get the help they need. However, war-related PTSD certainly isn’t new, and when the 20th century and its technological might ushered in massively brutal, worldwide conflicts that buried forever idea of a “gentleman’s war,” it also drastically increased the psychological pressures on combat troops. Motion pictures have been used to document the many aspects of war. Over the years, the United States government has commissioned a number of documentaries that look at soldiers returning from theaters of war, as they attempt to reintegrate into the society they left behind.

Perhaps the most famous documentary about returning soldiers is the 1946 film Let There Be Light by the acclaimed filmmaker John Huston, who considered the film to be one of his best movies. However, its fame derives mainly from being kept hidden for 35 years after it was made, by a War Department uncomfortable with the notion that there is any lasting downside to war for the returning veteran. The War Department was so uneasy about this documentary that it had the film remade as Shades of Gray, a propaganda docudrama based on Let There Be Light, which not only eliminated African-American soldiers from the cast, but also suggested that only soldiers who were disturbed before they went to war broke down upon their return.

Film history isn’t the only context in which to appreciate Huston’s hour-long documentary, his third and final film for the Army Signal Corps. Let There Be Light is also one of the earliest commercial depictions of psychotherapy, in this case the military’s use of it to treat what we now call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The U.S. military now offers a wide array of pre- and post-battle therapies to help soldiers recover from traumatic experiences. In contrast, Let There Be Light’s gruff doctors, who inject sodium amytal and conduct religious group therapy sessions, look prehistoric by comparison.

Nevertheless, Let There Be Light, like its routinely under-appreciated 1946 fictional counterpart, The Best Years of Our Lives, remains essential viewing. Each of the films conveys a sense of compassion toward soldiers; the soldiers presented in these films don’t ask to be called heroes, they only want normalcy. Today’s returning soldiers surely feel the same, and yet their experiences on the battlefield are increasingly abnormal, even unknown, to most people they encounter upon returning.

Seven months after the War Department forcibly prevented Let There Be Light from premiering at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, a disabled Army veteran named Harold Russell became the only man to win two Oscars for the same performance. Russell received the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and an Honorary Award for Nonprofessional aActing for his role as a returned soldier in The Best Years of Our Lives. William Wyler’s 168-minute drama concerns the homecomings of three soldiers, and it was showered with awards throughout the winter and spring of 1947, including a Best Picture Oscar and multiple Golden Globes and New York Film Critics Circle citations.

The Best Years of Our Lives and Let There Be Light aren’t cynical or judgmental of American society, but are quietly brave and emotionally devastating. Let There Be Light attempts to shield us with its preentation of hospital interiors that are clean, orderly and positively overstaffed. Nonetheless, the men and their stories are unforgettable. You finish watching the film feeling emotionally drained and deeply grateful that they won’t have to fight again.

The Studs Terkel Centenary: Chicago Celebrates Legendary Studs Terkel

May 16th marks the 100th anniversary of Studs Terkel’s birth and an occasion to memorialize one of the most prolific writers and cultural critics in the history of Chicago letters. As an author, broadcaster and oral historian, legendary Chicagoan Studs Terkel celebrated the lives of ordinary Americans. Some of Terkel’s many friends and fans are hoping to return the favor with a series of events marking the 100th birthday of a man whose work is a chronicle of the 20th century.

The Studs Terkel Centenary, a group headed up by Terkel’s friends, including Chicago Tribune reporter Rick Kogan, on Saturday will rededicate the Division Street Bridge, which was named after Terkel 20 years ago. On Wednesday, The Newberry Library will host a birthday party featuring guest speakers who will share stories about Studs. Terkel’s friends will ensure that his memory lives on with a day of Studs-only programming on WFMT-FM on his birthday, with performances of passages from Terkel’s 2001 book Will the Circle Be Unbroken? at Steppenwolf Theatre next week and by phoning in personal anecdotes about Terkel to a hotline set up by Chicago’s Hull House Museum.

A Tribute: Remembering Studs Terkel

Studs Terkel: The Human Voice (StoryCorps)

Remembering Studs Terkel: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

The New York Times reported that Chicago’s legendary Studs Terkel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose searching interviews with ordinary Americans helped establish oral history as a serious genre, and who for decades was the enthusiastic host of a popular nationally syndicated radio show on WFMT-FM in Chicago, died at his home at the age of 96.

In his oral histories, which he called guerrilla journalism, Mr. Terkel relied on his effusive but gentle interviewing style to bring forth in rich detail the experiences and thoughts of his fellow citizens. For more than the four decades, Studs produced a continuous narrative of great historic moments sounded by an American chorus in the native vernacular.

Division Street: America (1966), his first best seller, explored the urban conflicts of the 1960s. Its success led to Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (1970) and Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (1974).

Mr. Terkel’s book The Good War: An Oral History of World War II won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. In Talking to Myself: A Memoir of My Times (1977), Terkel turned the microphone on himself to produce an engaging memoir. In Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession (1992) and Coming of Age: The Story of Our Century by Those Who’ve Lived It (1995), he reached for his ever-present tape recorder for interviews on race relations in the United States and the experience of growing old.

In 1985, a reviewer for The Financial Times of London characterized his books as “completely free of sociological claptrap, armchair revisionism and academic moralizing.” The amiable Mr. Terkel was a gifted and seemingly tireless interviewer who elicited provocative insights and colorful, detailed personal histories from a broad mix of people. “The thing I’m able to do, I guess, is break down walls,” he once told an interviewer. “If they think you’re listening, they’ll talk. It’s more of a conversation than an interview.”

Readers of his books could only guess at Mr. Terkel’s interview style. Listeners to his daily radio show, which was first broadcast on WFMT-FM in 1958, got the full flavor as Studs, with both breathy eagerness and a tough-guy Chicago accent, went after the straight dope from guests like Sir Georg Solti, Muhammed Ali, Mahalia Jackson, the young Dob Dylan, Toni Morrison and Gloria Steinem.

John Lennon: Happy Xmas (War Is Over)

To my friends: I’d like to share this wisdom with you. It is from a Xmas card I received this year!

Watch your thoughts for they become words. Choose your words for they become actions. Understand your actions for they become habits. Study your habits for they become your character Develop your character for it will become your destiny.

Wishing you a joyful new year, big kiss! Yoko

In 1971, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, with the Harlem Community Choir, recorded their message against war, a part of their major multimedia campaign for peace, as a peace anthem, a song that has also become a Christmas standard: Happy Xmas (War Is Over). According to the John Lennon Museum, Lennon wrote the song as an attempt to get people to see war at a grassroots level and for them to take responsibility for the world around them.

So this is now the beginning of the Christmas season. And what have you done? The opening lines of the song, sung so nonchalantly by Lennon, serve as a call-to-action for us all. The holidays become critical moments in the year for personal assessments, to review our choices. And to make things better. If you want it.

Happy Christmas: WAR IS OVER! (If You Want It)

To my friends: I’d like to share this wisdom with you.
It is from a Xmas card I received this year!

Watch your thoughts for they become words.
Choose your words for they become actions.
Understand your actions for they become habits.
Study your habits for they become your character
Develop your character for it will become your destiny.

Wishing you a joyful new year,
big kiss!
yoko

WAR IS OVER! (If You Want It) is a documentary short film created by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. As 1969 came to a close, Lennon and Ono’s ideas about their protests against the Vietnam War grew beyond printing a few posters. As Ono notes in the documentary, Lennon was the one who dreamed big. “I said let’s have T-shirts,” Ono remembers, “and John said, ‘Let’s buy billboards.'” The posters were displayed as billboards in twelve major cities across the world. And the message appeared not only in mass-produced posters and postcards, but also in large newspaper ads, as well as on the radio and television. It was the first major multimedia campaign for peace.

In 1971, Lennon and Ono, with the Harlem Community Choir, recorded their message as a peace anthem, a song that has also become a Christmas standard: Happy Xmas (War Is Over). According to the John Lennon Museum, Lennon wrote the song as an attempt to get people to see war at a grassroots level and for them to take responsibility for the world around them.

So this is now the beginning of the Christmas season. And what have you done? The opening lines of the song, sung so nonchalantly by Lennon, serve as a call-to-action for us all. The holidays become critical moments in the year for personal assessment, to review our choices. And to make things better. If you want it.

Happy Christmas: WAR IS OVER! (If You Want It)

Following the breakup of the Beatles, John Lennon and Yoko Ono moved to New York City in 1971, where Lennon sought to escape the insane commotion of the Beatles era, and to focus on his family and private life. LENNONYC is a new feature-length documentary that takes an intimate look at the time Lennon, Yoko Ono and their son, Sean, spent living in New York City during the 1970s. The full version of the documentary is available for viewing below:

Kent State: The Day the War Came Home

May 4th, 2010, will mark the 40th Anniversary of the Kent State Shootings, also known as the Kent State Massacre, which took place at Kent State University in Ohio. It involved the shooting of unarmed college students by members of the Ohio National Guard on Monday, May 4, 1970. The guardsmen fired 67 rounds over a period of 13 seconds, killing four students and wounding nine others.

Some of the students who were shot had been protesting against the American invasion of Cambodia, which President Richard Nixon had announced in a television address on April 30. Other students who were shot had been walking nearby or observing the protest from a distance. There was a significant nation-wide response to the shootings: hundreds of universities, colleges, and high schools closed throughout the United States resulting from a student strike of four million students.

The Silent City: An Introspectively Surreal Vision of War

The Silent City is an astonishing Oscar-nominated short film by Ruairi Robinson, which brilliantly combines computer graphics with live footage. The film is a concisely introspective surreal story about wartime, which shows the ordeal of three soldiers who are on the outskirts of a war torn city. While patrolling an area in a secluded sector of a now silent city, a bomb is accidentally set off and they have to wait for help. One reviewer claims that The Silent City rivals anything seen about wartime since Coppola’s Apocalypse Now or Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. The film provides a powerful statement about our troops who are now facing death in foreign lands.

All We Are Saying is Give Peace a Chance

It was this week in 1969 that more than 2 million people gathered in all parts of the country and in Washington, D.C., to demonstrate for peace in Vietnam in the largest protest in U.S. history. Candlelight vigils were held for those who had been killed since the beginning of the war in 1961. By the end of the year, 45,000 American troops had been killed.